Previously on this blog series: "So, I started writing..."
I wrote everything I had experienced with my dad over the past eighteen months. I wrote about every doctor's visit, how quickly his symptoms were changing, every time he tried to put a shoe on over a shoe he was already wearing, every time someone would ask me if he was getting better, etc.. I knew that I wasn't going to use all of this information I was writing, but it mattered that I used my story to prove a point.
There's something that most people don't tell you about when you are experiencing grief. The world you live in when you are grieving and the world around you that keeps turning are very different places. The world around you never stops moving, but your world when you are grieving does stop. You're trying to figure out this new version of yourself and make new parts of your life without the person you lost. With everything going on all at once, you sometimes just live without taking in all the details you need to.
So, when people ask me how I built the exhibition, I don't really know what to say, because I don't really remember.
September 2020. My first test shot for my Capstone.
I remember the bigger moments like trying to figure out how I wanted my paper to be written, practicing my presentation to my classmates, and interviewing everyone who participated in my creative work. But, when people ask for how I felt through out that process and what I was thinking about while creating, I don't really have a clear answer. I was so busy trying to navigate my grief and work my way through the outside world that I didn't really take in how I was. Even after I completed my work, I still couldn't absorb how I was feeling. It all came and went so fast.
I do remember how difficult it was to get my point across for me Capstone idea. I would explain my idea, which I chose to be how young adults between the ages of eighteen and thirty grieve differently and have different expectations on how to grieve placed on them than people in other age groups (That took the wind out of me). I got a number of responses such as, "Why would someone want to read about something so sad?" or "No one wants to hear about something they can't relate to". But, I also got a lot of statements like, "I think more people need to be talking about this" and "I lost someone too. This made me feel heard" (The last one made me really happy and tear up). To the people that said anything remotely close to the last two statements, thank you. You're part of the reason I feel so strongly about that topic.
October 2020. My second test shot for my Capstone.
Through the cloudiness of my emotions and grief mixed in with my other classwork, I'm amazed I remembered anything. To be honest, I still have to look back at my Capstone paper to remember most of the things I wrote. Not just because it's over 20 pages long, but because I don't remember most of what I said. Sometimes, I look back at it and can't believe that I wrote it.
The parts I loved the most was also the hardest: the interviews and taking the images. I photographed the people I interviewed with objects from their person that died and in places they felt comfortable. Hearing the stories from other people in my life who had lost someone young and who were young when they lost them was hard, all of them being heartbreaking in their own ways. On top of that, I needed to take images that didn't portray the sadness, but showed the people behind the grief. That they're more than the loss they experienced, but they need support too. Just like everyone else. I'm forever grateful for the people that let me talk to them and photograph them. It's not always easy opening up about loss, but the people I talked to did it so well. I hope they know how much I appreciate them.
February 2021. Outtake of Julia.
Building the creative work was technically not terribly difficult, but conceptually very hard. I had never done a project where I was making documentary photography in a fine art way. I knew that how I displayed the images had to be more "creative" than the images themselves. All of the pieces had to tell a story, but they needed to balance the scale I made. I remember why I put the images on panels. I wanted these images to look like they were displayed in a home, not a gallery. It reminded me of pinning pictures to a pin board or in a scrap book. So, I ripped the edges of the prints I made to make the shapes of the prints more organic and to give sense of being in a home. I used safety pins to hold the images onto the makeshift pin boards and added pages with quotes from the interviews onto handmade paper, and also put those on the pinboards.
I guess I remember more than I thought.
Comments